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How We Knew AL00667 Would Miss Earth
jefu writes "In January there seems to have been an incident in which it was thought that an object (asteroid) in space might have hit the earth within a couple of days of being spotted. It did miss, though. This story (from NASA/Ames) talks about the discovery of the object and the process that astronomers went through to determine if the asteroid was or was not a threat."
perhaps AL00667 creates MADMEN
Another article on Miss Earth
Have Linux installed at your place in Amsterdam, for cheap
that most people didn't hear about the asteroid until long after the near-miss was over. Seems to bring up the old argument of whether it'd be better to inform the public and try to do something about it or keep it under wraps and possibly die in blissful ignorance...
Onlooker1: It would mean the end of life as we know it ? ... but we don't really see a threat to the human species. .... not to mention rabid money hungry CEO types... along with a few cities as collateral damage.
Scientist: No, but it might burn up a few cities and destory 70% of the humans
Onlooker2: So I'd be dead ?
Scientist: But the people left alive will have an excellent chance of survival due to the systematic culling of slashdot trolls
Onlooker1: Why did you keep it under the wraps ?
Scientist: We were kinda hoping it would slag Sanford Wallace in location... and have the Pope claim it was divine intervention
Onlooker3: What about SCO ?
Scientist: Looks like the next one from Kuiper belt would do that clean
PS: maybe you should read "God's Debris" to be frightened by Slashdot.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Most all missle defense proposals depend on punching a hole in an ICBM by heating it. For all their destructive potential, ICBMs are 90% thin skinned gas tank. You could take one out with a grenade, if you could somehow get it there.
The power required to destroy any rock big enough to survive atmospheric entry would be orders of magnitude greater.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Short Warning Times
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Article Posted: February 19, 2004
By: David Morrison
For the story of AL00667, which briefly masqueraded as an asteroid that would hit the Earth within two days of its discovery, read on.
February 19, 2004 Short Warning Times
Following is information on the small asteroid known last January 13-14 as AL00667. A preliminary analysis of the discovery data for this object yielded a possible impact with Earth in less than 2 days time -- a situation not encountered previously in the Spaceguard Program. Although we knew at the time that such a prediction of imminent impact was improbable, a collision could not be ruled out. And if a possibility of an impact in 2 days existed, what should we do about notifying governments or the public? The story of this situation on January 13, 2004, is included as part of a paper by Clark Chapman (Southwest Research Institute) presented on February 22 at the Planetary Defense conference of the AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics). Several paragraphs taken from this paper are reproduced below. Following these quotes from Chapman's paper are additional quotes from a letter Brian Marsden (Minor Planet Center) wrote to CCNet on 14 January on the same subject. Finally, there is a statement posted on the website of the IAU (International Astronomical Union) discussing what lessons we should draw from the story of AL00667, and how such a situation might be better handled in the future.
Asteroids never cease to surprise us. We may never encounter a situation just like this again, but we are fairly sure to have other crises as the rate of discovery of NEAs continues to increase.
David Morrison
FROM CLARK CHAPMAN'S AIAA PAPER "NEO IMPACT SCENARIOS"
presented February 22, 2004
"Just last month (January 2004) perhaps the most surprising impact prediction ever came and went, this time out of the view of the round-the-clock news media. It illustrates how an impact prediction came very close to having major repercussions, even though -- with hindsight -- nothing was ever, in reality, threatening to impact. It is a story of success in that the impact prediction was nullified in record time, less than half-a-day, but the success was accomplished through a set of ad hoc, unofficial, and often unfunded activities and relationships, although assisted in major ways by the official infrastructure, such as it exists (the LINEAR Project, the IAU Minor Planet Center, and the NASA NEO Program Office).
"About 36 hours before President Bush's planned speech at NASA Headquarters on future American space policy, the Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) observatories in New Mexico routinely recorded four images of a moving object. Half a day later, on Tuesday, January 13th, these data were sent (as part of the daily submission of data) to the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Just before going to dinner, MPC research Tim Spahr ran the data through standard software to generate a nominal ephemeris for the new object. These are posted on the publicly accessible NEO Confirmation Page (NEOCP) so that amateur and professional asteroid astronomers around the world might be able to follow up on the LINEAR observations that night. It is through such follow-up astrometry that NEO orbits can be refined so that the object is not permanently lost. Spahr posted the ephemeris, based on LINEAR's four detections, on the NEOCP under the designation AL00667, along with ephemerides for several other recommended targets. Less than an hour later, a European amateur astronomer, Reiner Stoss, went to the NEOCP and noticed a curiosity: AL00667 was predicted to get 40 times brighter during just the next day, meaning that it was going to be six times closer to the Earth! He expressed his amazement on Yahoo's MPML (Minor Planet Mailing List) chatroom on the internet.
"Professional asteroid researcher Alan Harris happened to be monitoring the chatroom and noticed the strange
Tell me Mr.Politician, what is more important: Survival of mankind or playing the powermonger game with your politician-buddys?
;)
If the asteroid were a political party, you'd find a great deal of people supporting any effort at crushing it.
I think it's time to label asteroids as "liberal" or "terrorist" to get things moving
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
It seems like you are suggesting that this new technological ability to detect NEO's and possible impacts as being similar to the "Boy who cried wolf" fable.
The problem is, as we all know, the wolf finally did arrive one day...
Besides everyone knows the world ends in 2017 due to old UNIX Y2K17 bug & embedded NT licence key expiry causing cascade failure of ICBM guidance systems. ;-) lol I will need Lead underpants soon... ha ha ha
Relax, Statically speaking you will probably win the lotto 12 times, get struck by lighting 302 times, and die from stress or cancer 240 million times... likely to happen long before then... ;-)
Slashdotters can continue to sleep comfortably with the knowledge that TCP/IP is designed to withstand such an event; lets just hope there's a backup of the /. backend in case its server(s) get struck, shorted by the tsunami, or looted by the local villagers.
Hmm.. lets see. Your in an underground bunker, sealed from the outside world, with nothing to eat but baked beans and beer. If that isn't a recepie for a WMD gas attack then I don't know what is!
We were lucky this time, but it is clear that we need to do something about such threats. Here is what I propose:
We build a nondescript isosceles triangular spaceship, controlled by one man with a joystick. Left and right rotate the ship, up thrusts the ship forward, and down, well, down depends upon your configuration. Optionally, it could throw the ship through hyperspace to some other random point in space, or else it could put deflector shields up around the ship.
In addition to the joystick, the ship's pilot should have access to a red button (it must be red). Pressing the button should cause balls of energy to shoot out of the front of the ship, capable of breaking apart large asteroids, and destroying small ones. Pressing the button should also make a "PCHOW!" sound.
It is our clearest and best long-term option.
Mod me down as flaimbait or whatever, but I personally think we need a global cataclysm. We don't need something that kills off the entire human population, but we certainly need something to cleanse our planet. We need something to take our collective heads out of our asses and come together as one people and work together for the common good.
do you really think a global cataclysm would make people work together for the common good more than they do today? Or is it more likely that resources would become greatly limited so humans would be more likely to kill each other for their own good? While human life is still a struggle for resources, I doubt the red cross was around in the caveman days, helping the guy who got clubbed on the head and had his dinner stolen.